Word: monsieurs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Hwang hints at this role reversal in the title with M. for Monsieur in place of Madame. This clever touch is hardly subtle. While he successfully manages to assemble a vast panorama of social and political issues, Hwang sometimes tries so hard to get his point across, he practically beats it into our heads with a sledgehammer. His message is an important one, but its didactic presentation eclipses the humor he tries so hard to achieve...
...acting in his films. Never a formal innovator, Chaplin found his persona and plot early and never totally abandoned them. For 13 years, he resisted talking pictures, launched with The Jazz Singer in 1927. Even then, the talkies he made, among them the masterpieces The Great Dictator (1940), Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and Limelight (1952), were daringly far-flung variations on his greatest silent films, The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), The Circus (1928) and City Lights...
When a character in Monsieur Verdoux remarks that if the unborn knew of the approach of life, they would dread it as much as the living do death, Chaplin was simply spelling out what we've known all along. The Tramp, it seemed, was mute not by necessity but by choice. He'd tried to protect us from his thoughts, but if the times insisted that he tell what he saw as well as what he was, he could only reveal that the innocent chaos of comedy depends on a mania for control, that the cruelest of ironies attend...
...would have a special cocktail I prepared for him, and at hotel staff parties he would drink," he recalls. "But he was not a big boozer." In the private Ritz Club downstairs, an employee says, "everyone here knows what really happened, but we're afraid to talk." He adds, "Monsieur Paul was not responsible. He just took orders...
WATCH TOWER: Parisian days and nights fly by on a 50-ton, 1,342-light sign at the second level of Monsieur Eiffel's iron landmark...